Cheatgrass

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Cheatgrass Page 16

by Bart Paul


  “Well, we know he’s close.” When we spoke, we spoke at a whisper.

  “What a sicko,” she said. “You going inside?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What if he’s inside?”

  “Then we can get this over quick.”

  “Tommy …”

  “I’m just going to grab the Coleman. Then draw his attention outside while you load these horses quick as you can.”

  “I’ll be right behind you,” she said. “Just don’t get yourself shot.”

  “Nobody shoots me but you.”

  With the glare in the background, it was black as hell in the cabin. I could tell somebody was in there with us as soon as I stepped inside. Then I bumped into an iron bunk that had been moved into our path, and Sarah bumped into me. I reached behind me and kind of gathered her close. She knew exactly why. The only sound was the rattle of the diesel outside.

  A match head scraped on cast iron and lit the cabin up with yellow-green light. He held it under his chin. When he laughed, his face under his hat jumped in the long shadows and the laugh echoed hollow up the stovepipe like death itself.

  “Howdy buckaroos and buckarettes,” he said. I saw a pistol in the matchlight pointed at Sarah’s head. It looked more like a Beretta than his SIG, but it was too dark to tell or matter. “What can I do you for?”

  A noise came out of Sarah, but not because of the gun pointing at her. It was him. He’d changed his outfit again since we’d seen him on the ridge. Now he was wearing a palm leaf hat and plaid shirt with the blood-red wild rag. It was exactly the outfit that Lester Wendover had worn in that photo of Sarah with her French boyfriend, Lester, and me at the Deer Hunters’ Dance.

  “You be careful with that pistol. Hurt a hair on her head, I slit your eyelids.” I held my .270 careful in one hand so he could see it.

  “Aw, you wouldn’t do that,” he said. He held the match higher.

  We watched that match burn down in spite of ourselves. I figured I only had a few seconds of light. I could see the glass and green metal of the Coleman lamp on the table.

  “I wouldn’t go betting on me. I got no clue what I would or wouldn’t do right about now.”

  “So my wife belongs to you now?”

  “She belongs to nobody but herself.”

  “How ’bout that knife?” He held out his free hand. “Who’s that belong to, huh?”

  I held out my knife. He nodded at the table, and I set it there. His eyes went from the knife down to the match for an instant, like he couldn’t help looking at it either.

  “Just tell me,” Sarah said. She took a step closer to him. Her voice was shaky. “Tell me why you killed my dad.”

  Her voice broke just as he made a little sound like a whimper when the match flame burned down to his fingertips and the room went dark. His 9mm popped twice—once into the ceiling boards and once through a windowpane. The shots rang in the stovepipe, and I grabbed Sarah and we hit the floor. There was a scrape of a table on the planking and I could see the headlights outline his shadow then blaze off the knife blade for an instant when he yanked the cabin door wide. Then he was gone.

  I grabbed the Coleman by the bale with one hand, and with the Remington in the other I scampered out the door after him. I stayed low, keeping out of the truck lights, figuring he wouldn’t turn back to look until he had some cover. I ran down to the open pen and slid in with the cows and calves. I pulled up the glass on the lantern, pumped it up and set a match to the mantles. The cattle stirred up with that bright gaslight and I stirred right along with them, setting the lantern on a corner post after I got the flame adjusted.

  The wind was picking up like the storm was close. The lantern rattled on the post, the mantles flaring and dimming with every gust. I heard a shot and the rip of a round splintering a corral board. He was still just playing with us like that day shooting at me at the dump. I heard the metal creak of the trailer door closing as I crept along the fence. I disappeared into the dark, and a second shot thunked into a cabin log. I kept my head low and ran up the slope for the Ford.

  “Long day, assholes?” somebody yelled. It was hard to hear over the wind, but it wasn’t Kip and didn’t sound like one of the ironpumping gunsels either. Kip had got himself more help.

  I hopped into the Ford, put it in drive and hopped right out again. I almost fell as I slammed the door and watched it roll off down the road. The back window shattered and a second shot clanged off the steel of the flatbed before it chugged off into the piñon. I pulled the .45 and fired twice toward where the voice came from, then ran past the cabin out to the road.

  Sarah had her truck moving. I ran parallel and grabbed at the door handle as she picked up speed with lights off. She’d unplugged the trailer from the truck, so even the gooseneck brake lights wouldn’t show, only the brake lights on the truck. I jumped in and pulled the door closed but didn’t slam it. We were hoping to get out into the darkness before Kip and his guys quite figured who the hell was where. The Silverado took two rounds to the right side of the truck-box behind me, and one to the passenger door just in front of my foot before the road dropped into a gully. The next two or three rounds zipped by over our heads, and by then we were gone into the dark.

  “You okay?” Sarah said. She was bent forward, trying to see the dirt road with no headlights.

  “Not bad. That kind of looked like we were desperate as hell and running for our lives.”

  “Weren’t we?”

  “Yeah, but we knew what we were going to do. Old Kip didn’t.”

  “A pretty scary distinction,” she said. “I’m not used to getting shot at. You get used to it, right?”

  “Nope.”

  We pulled out of the gully on our way north for the third time that day. It sounded like one last round nicked the gooseneck, but we couldn’t stop to check. We both just peered through the dirty windshield as the first trace of rain spattered it. Sarah turned on the wipers. I saw a bit of paper or something dragging back and forth across the spotted glass.

  We couldn’t see it, but we could hear the sage brushing the underside of the truck as we wandered off the dirt track. Sarah made a correction and got us back on the road. After a few more minutes she said we were about where the road forked and let the truck roll to a stop. We got out. She examined the ruts, trying to find where they turned off. I went back to see if any of the horses had been hit. They were quiet and seemed untouched, but it was hard to know for certain in the dark. I pulled out my phone to give them a quick look with the dim light and didn’t find any injury, so I caught up with Sarah. She said the left fork fish-hooked back to the meadows. From where we stood, we could look toward the cabin and see the glow of the Ford’s headlights and see even fainter lights moving around—somebody making sure we weren’t up to some mischief in the shadows. The lights didn’t appear to be following yet. A low piñon-covered ridge hid the cabin itself and would have blocked their view of us even in daylight. I guessed that the cowcamp was three-quarters of a mile behind us, maybe as much as a mile. I walked down the left fork a bit, studying the contours in the dark that I had seen in daylight that morning, seeing where the land dropped away to the left of the road toward the last of the meadows and how it rose up heading for Washoe Pass. There were already puddles forming on the road. We got back in the cab.

  “Where does this left fork go once you top the pass?”

  “All the way down to Carson Valley,” she said. “Right into the suburbs.”

  “Is it steep?”

  “Steep enough,” she said, “and rocky.”

  “And the fork straight ahead from here?”

  “It’s the wagon road to Dayton,” she said, “but I haven’t gone up there since I was a kid.”

  “And the right fork is that rocky road we took today?”

  “Correct.”

  “Okay. Let’s ditch this rig.”

  The rain was getting slushy like snow on the windshield. I got out and grabbed the piece of notepape
r from under the wiperblade. Back in the cab I read it by the light of my phone. The paper was soggy but the writing was clear.

  Hey my sexy minx … you can run but you can’t hide. Oh by the way, I didn’t kill your dad.

  Happy Trails, doll …

  I handed the paper to Sarah. She read it, took a long breath, and handed it back to me.

  “What the hell does he mean?” she said. “Does this mean Dad’s really—?”

  “It means Kip’s trying to drive you nuts. Don’t let him.”

  She grabbed the paper back from me. “Dot-dot-dot. What a fruit.” She squished it in her hand and threw it in the mud.

  Sexy minx, my ass.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Sarah picked up speed to maybe fifteen miles an hour. I could feel the four horses scramble for footing in the trailer as we rattled along in the dark, sometimes on the road, other times not. We hadn’t gone far when my phone chirped in my pocket. For the first time in hours I had service. I saw I had a voicemail from Jack Harney and a text from Fuchs. I was trying to call Jack back when a call came in.

  “Hey, Jack. Talk to me.”

  “Tommy Smith?” somebody said. “This isn’t Jack. It’s Deputy Parrott, Douglas County.”

  “Oh, hey, Roger.”

  “I’ve been trying to reach you,” he said. “Sarah Cathcart’s boss wanted me to give you guys a head’s-up about trouble in my county. You heard anything about it?”

  “We been pretty much out of pocket the past day, Rog.”

  “Well, first, yesterday a.m. there was a break-in near Cathcart’s. A ranch house. Firearms were taken. Then couple hours later there was a shooting at State Line Lodge,” he said. “Two guys heisted a cashier’s cage in the casino in broad daylight just as one of our deputies walked in for a bite. Heisters shot him down right in the doorway—sauntered out just as cool as you please, okay.”

  “When was this?”

  “Yesterday. About two.”

  “Who was the deputy?”

  “Marco Aurillia. Drug Task Force liaison. Had a taste for the anytime day-or-night three-ninety-nine biscuits and gravy.”

  “You ID-ed the shooters?”

  “Not yet.” His phone broke up and he said something I couldn’t make out, so I had him repeat it. It sounded like the deputy wasn’t conscious, and one of the shooters fit Delroy’s description. If the other one was Kip, it wasn’t clear. “These guys are known associates of Jedediah Boone, so we got a regular outlaw-gang crime spree. Folks are locking their doors, okay.”

  “Was one of the shooters Kip Isringhausen?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “I thought he was in Oregon.”

  “He’s a mile and a half behind us on the Washoe Pass road. He’s well-armed, not alone, and coming on fast.”

  “Whoa,” Roger said. “Are you sure it’s Isringhausen? Where are you guys exactly?” Then he broke up again.

  I told him our position and told him to pass it on to Mitch and Fuchs ASAP. He said affirmative, then he broke up altogether.

  Sarah took her foot off the gas and coasted to a stop at the fork in the road we had taken that morning. The spattering rain had turned to snow.

  “Is this the place?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “He can’t miss the rig if we leave it here.”

  “This is a good spot. It’ll look like we stalled out or panicked and we’re running scared.”

  “Isn’t that what we’re doing?”

  “Not a bit. We got him right where we want him.”

  She almost laughed at that. We unloaded the horses, leaving saddled the two we’d ridden that day. I threw Harvey’s pack saddle on Dave’s roan and rigged that up while Sarah cut open the haybale and stuffed flakes of it into the pack bags along with big ziplocks of grain. We hoisted the two bags, slipping the loops over the sawbuck, and set the kitchen stuffsack in the middle. We unrolled the bedroll and spread it folded across the top of the load, covered it with the pack tarp then lashed the whole thing down. We got mounted and headed on out of there, riding back down the road in steady snow.

  “Do you think he’ll follow us tonight?” Sarah said.

  “You know him better than I do. But he’ll be thinking he’s got us bottled up in those canyons with no way back to the cattle guard except past him.”

  “If he finds the gooseneck fast, he can track us in this snow,” she said. “But I can’t picture him slogging out here in the dark very long once the snow covers our tracks. He’s too much of a pussy.”

  “Nice talk for a well brought-up girl.”

  “So I guess he’ll stay warm in the cabin and come at us in the morning.”

  We didn’t ride far. We followed the road back toward the cowcamp then took that first westerly fork that led toward the meadows. Even with no moon to guide us, it wasn’t quite full dark so we could see the shapes of the land. We weren’t far up that fork when we dropped off to the left onto sandy ground that drained the last meadow. We angled away from the road until we had a small sage-covered ridge on our left and a single huge juniper on our right. The juniper shielded us from the meadow beyond.

  We set up a picket line with our lash rope between the juniper and a scrub piñon. We tied and unsaddled, and fed the horses hay. I covered our rigs with the pack tarp as Sarah got out some food. We unrolled the bedroll and huddled, munching on cheese and salami and crackers, washing it down with whiskey and water and not saying a word. I studied the ground around us. We were pretty exposed but it didn’t feel that way. We were about halfway between the cabin and the truck, but tucked between the little hill and the big tree it made a good camp. The snow had stopped and we could see a few stars, but there was a big snow cloud wrapped over the ridge like fog. There was a glow to the cloud like moonlight behind a ridge, but I figured it was only the city lights of Carson City lighting it up from the other side of the mountain. We stashed our boots and guns in the folds of the tarp, then crawled in the bed with our clothes on and just held each other for what seemed like a long time.

  It was one of those nights when you don’t really sleep. You just doze and wake with a start, then go under deep. And when you wake again it’s only been minutes and you wonder what you’ve done with your life. We were still a long way from midnight when Sarah got a text from Mitch. He told her about the shoot-out at State Line Lodge and about the wounded deputy, but that was all. Nothing about where we were or when he might be coming up behind Kip to put the squeeze on.

  She was sniffling as she handed me her phone. I called Mitch back, but she wasn’t getting any service. I tried my phone and called Jack. I got him for a second but he broke up, too.

  “I can’t believe I’ve come to this,” she said. “Less than two weeks ago …” She didn’t finish and was quiet for a while.

  “Tell me it’ll get better,” she said. “That time heals all wounds. Can you tell me that?”

  “Wish I could.”

  She touched my wet eyes with her fingertips.

  “Oh god—your dad,” she said. “Is that why you left the first time?” She grabbed me and cried a bit then nodded off.

  I tried to let my eyes adjust so I could see her. Her eyebrows stood out pale from her face, and it took me a minute to realize that they were pale with snow. It had started falling again, soft and quiet. I kissed the snow away and pulled the top of the tarp over our heads and snapped the canvas closed and let her cry in my arms until she truly slept. With the phone off it was dark as a tomb under that tarp.

  “What’s with this magpie crap?” she said. She was mumbly but wide awake all of a sudden, and me who’d been dozing.

  “Beats the shit out of me. Just another scavenger bird.”

  “But pretty,” she said, “in its way.”

  I found the whiskey in the dark and unscrewed the cap and took a drink. I asked her if she wanted some and I could feel her shake her head no.

  “Don’t be getting any more bad habits,” she said.

  I almost said so
mething back, but it seemed sort of crass. What I was about to say reminded me of joking with Ofelia Cruz, and I hadn’t thought of her for what seemed like forever.

  “So what’s with Kip trying to look like me or Lester?”

  “Because he can’t be Tommy Smith.” She rolled and pulled my arm over her and held it as she tried to sleep. “That should be pretty obvious, honey, even to you.”

  When I finally woke up it was dead quiet and dark under the tarp. Sarah was asleep, and I pushed the canvas back slow as not to wake her. When I’d opened it a foot, snow fell into my face. I brushed it off my cheek and neck and raised my head. It was dawn and there was about four inches of snow on the tarp. Our saddles and pads were buried under it and the horses stood still on the picket line with snow on their butts, their manes and tails bright with spikes of ice. The juniper drooped with snow, and the whole country around us was silent and white.

  Cold air on her face woke Sarah. She pulled her head up just a bit to see what I’d seen, then slid back down under the blankets.

  “At least our tracks are covered,” she said.

  The sun wasn’t up yet but the sky was clear. “Until we make new ones.”

  I yawned and stretched and felt around for my hat, rifle, and .45. I drank from a water bottle. I found my boots and pulled them on, got up and climbed into my coat and saw Sarah watching me from the bedroll. I took my rifle and made long steps toward the picket line to leave as few footprints as I might.

  When I got close to our horses, I froze. They weren’t moving but each was watching, ears up, eyes focused at something out in the meadow beyond the shelter of the juniper. I crouched and angled around, keeping the big tree between me and whatever was out there and never taking my eyes off the horses for more than a second. When I was close against the shaggy juniper trunk, I stopped and scanned the field of snow, then took a second to glance backward. I saw Sarah watching me, worried as she got into her boots and coat and pulled her 12 gauge from the tarp. She was as careful as the horses had been not to make any noise or fast movement. I found a spot between the limbs where I could see out unobstructed. The dun mare quivered on the picket line and let out a little nicker I could barely hear as her forefeet moved in place. Then she raised her tail and dropped her hindquarters a bit and pissed deep yellow into the snow. Sarah looked confused as hell when she saw me touch my lips and motion her over. I was watching bits of color and movement out in the meadow. She reached me in the shelter of the juniper and moved in close as I put a hand on her back.

 

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